Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

What the Hell am I doing?

I promised to end my League of Legends project on Jan 2. It's Jan 24 and it's not closed. I had the statistics 6 weeks ago and since then I'm feeding "Type A-B-C-D" bullshit. Yesterday I wrote "what seemed the end goal - Gold - now just looks as a stepping stone. I can't even guess how high I can climb."

What the Hell? No it wasn't a troll post. I meant when I wrote it. It needed a Support Hecarim (post tomorrow) to wake up and realize how far I went from my original goal: fighting for rational and a-social solutions. Climbing high on a twitch game ladder that I know to be rigged?! For what? op.gg says Ladder Rank 385,936 (26.26% of top). I already at the edge of the top quarter with abysmal skills and playing a single undertuned champion. If that doesn't convince someone that the exploit works, will top 20%? Or top 10%? Or top 1%?! Let's be real, for a competitive person in Platinum 1, 45 LP, someone with Platinum 1, 44LP is a "worthless scrub". These people won't listen to anyone. They aren't the audience. The audience supposed to be the ordinary players struggling in ELO Hell.

But I lost sight of it, because I was so dragged into competition. You see, I'm no superhuman. Fighting competitive instincts is an everyday struggle. I wish to be recognized and celebrated. I know it's stupid. I know it is fake and worthless. But I wish it anyway. To fight it needs constant focus and self-reflection. To realize that being laughed at by the "l33t" while providing useful information is much more valuable than making them go silent by beating them.

The LoL permanent page will be published the moment I reach Gold or on next Monday, whichever comes first. Gold is a milestone and since I just failed an attempt, I get a free win for next try. But if I get unlucky and can't reach it until Monday, I just leave it there. The statistics speaks for itself anyway. I return to creating something positive instead of pursuing yet another rigged nonsense.

14 comments:

Skeddar
said...

Hm. So after winning quite a few games in a row, dreaming of the endless horizons... you got a loss streak of 8 games and dropped back to Silver II, one division better than last season when you didn't have your perfected formular. You end the project having a nearly perfect 50% win rate after 400 games.

I will wait for the final theory and results to form my opinion, I just wonder how convincing it will be in the current situation. Like a poker player telling everyone he found the perfect strategy to get rich, first he loses a lot, then he wins a lot, then he loses a lot... and ends with a perfect 0$ balance in the end.

The next problem is... the 'proof' of your theories, despite your own data which obviously could be just as rigged as certain matchmakings, would be if people can use your system to climb. But if you publish it and you are right about everything, Riot might fix the system so your exploit doesn't work anymore. In which case you would be the only 'living proof' for your theories... which got you from Silver 3 to Silver 2 with a 50% winrate after 400 games.

So I just wonder if the target audience, "the ordinary players struggling in ELO Hell", give you any credibility, as they're usually impressed by shiny ranks or good win rates.

The issue with any MMR claim in League of Legends ("I am top 26.26% therefore ...") is that we have no clue what part of that entire player pool can even be considered relevant. There is an enormous amount of people playing LoL, which means that there is a significant percentage of people playing ranked LoL who simply have no business being in the same pool as a lot of other people. Matchmaking is sort of an attempt to handle this, by separating people into bands of MMR (so you have a lot of smaller pools of players that play each other and move up or down between these virtual leagues).

This is ok for enforcing balanced matches (after a while, the system needs you to play a lot of games to rate you properly), but it does nothing in terms of telling you how good you are relative to other RELEVANT people. In sports there are nominally two ways to generate some kind of standard. One is age brackets (10 year olds play LoL with 40 year olds every day). The other is amateur/pro (same deal, actual pros also play in soloqueue with amateurs and a very low % of eligible amateurs ever go pro despite ability). In a system like LoL where everyone is put in the same bucket and allowed to sort themselves out, there is no way to set standards by which to measure oneself. Trackable stats like KDA/farm are not even close enough to measuring player skill, as there is no way to measure decision making ability which is a huge part of a player's contribution to the outcome of a game. The only thing you can know is if you play a billion games but are stuck on the same rating, your skills are worth exactly the rank you have and you are not improving with repeated games, which still tells exactly you nothing about what that level is.

Just knowing that you are at X MMR doesn't tell you if you are meeting/exceeding/failing reasonable expectations because the leagues/ranks don't even exist in terms of matchmaking, you are always playing within a band of +/- N rating, so you are by definition always right in the middle of your "real league".

Note that there is no reasonable way to fix this in the current system. You could arbitrarily say the cutoff point is bronze or silver, but in any such case all you've done is improved the overall quality of the player pool - if you are top 25% of [allPlayers - (bronze + silver)], this means a lot more than being top 25% of everyone, but you are still missing a static reference, so there is nothing to stop the LoL population from increasing in size while decreasing in overall skill.

Note that most physical sports do not have this problem. Amateur boxing has very few noob feeders, and they don't stay long because the consequences of failing to meet static standards in a boxing match are severe. The bronze 5 equivalent of amateur boxing is overwhelmingly likely to win against a complete novice that only just learned the rules that day, while I would not bet a nickel on the "bronze 5 vs person that just finished tutorial" match (I lie, I'd likely bet on the latter).

@Skeddar: my total winrate is skewed by various tests (for example I played 50 games queued as support and went Warwick Jungle). Also, on the last 20 games I had 13 "sure defeat", and I simply failed to turn enough to win. So the formula worked, just I go an unlucky streak - or another prison period for whatever reason - maybe even a dev knowing that I won't be able to continue due to WW update, so screwed with the results.

Still, I finished in the top 1/3 of the ranked players, which isn't bad with playing a single, undertuned champion with so low skill that I regularly had less damage than the support.

I expect the majority of those 75% are to be casual players have little interest in their rank. Those that do care have ready-made excuses in that they "play for fun" and are not "no-lifers"As you have epiphanied for yourself, your final rank is meaningless. There is no context for your achievements. Getting to the top 25% by playing exploit-mode means nothing without comparing it with your non-exploit mode results. You need a control. Then we can establish if you have either a viable method for rational and a-social players to get out of ELO-hell or proof that the game is rigged.

Why should be the 75% impressed by you ? As Empz said, it is nothing impressive, people will look up to players that are in top 1% instead. And some got there by playing solely one champ just like you. I'm missing the "impressive feat" here.

@Gevlon: don't get me wrong, it was/is not my intention to bully you nor to traduse you.Maybe when you have posted your prove of the unfair matchmaking, i'd think different about this, but for now it doesen't make sense to me, to claim "because i can make it to the top 25%, my theory is right".

Gevlon, can you explain how playing 400 games wont make you better on understanding the game and decision making, even slightly better on skills top? Few better decisions when and where to add pressure improves win chance alot. It might be enough to explain your slow climb? You might be right, but remember, correlation does not imply causation. Numbers might show something what is not there.

> "play for fun" players don't play ranked, because it has longer matchmaking and pre-game. Normal game is instant.

"play for fun" players couldn't care less about longer matchmaking and pre-game, this much I can tell you as a die-hard play4fun player.

Reasons I don't play ranked:

1) Ranked games are anti-fun by definition. Because they treat gameplay as an obstacle on the path to e-peen length. To win, you have to pick champs everybody (including you) hates (nobody would hate underpowered champ), make a build everyone (including you) hates (usually because it has only one boring purpose and useless for actually playing the game outside of it), play tactics everyone (including you) hates (like those snorefest stalls till 45 minutes, avoiding every interaction and grinding like it's lineage all over again), all for what? I never understood e-peen factor and most likely never will. There is nothing in gaming which would make me go against having fun. Against taking an early teamfight which will be decided by skill instead of stalling for 45 minutes till at can be decided by better farm. And ranked play makes you do just that - to deliberately strip all fun from the gaming in the name of... stripping it for the enemy team too. It's literally puking contest, whoever makes opponent puke first wins, with both parties being covered in vomit either way. Yuck!2) Ranked games have an incurable case of neversurrendertardosis. Obviously in games that start bad you have to let enemy get a quick push and end it by minute 12-15 instead of having a snorefest or feedfest till 20. In normals this can happen, but rankedfags would scream bloody murder on you if you try to save your precious little playtime that way, and would never surrender 4-20 game just because "they may dc and we win, now stfu and stall".3) Can't always get champ I want. Only 4 morons to compete for it in normals, compared to 9 morons and bans in ranked.4) Ranked is a niche mode only 7% of monthly active playerbase plays anyway, who cares about it? Aram is more played than that. Remove it, 93% will only notice the difference if rare neversurrendertards pollute their games (though with being 7% they would normally be a surrenderable minority of 1, which is why we need a solo queue where those sick bastards can't premade for surrender control).

Hope this reasoning helps you because, one again, I couldn't fucking care any less about longer pre-match and queue times. Also, normal game is far from instant if you're at least above gold trashes.

> Last anon pretty much summed up, why I hate that kind of players. Basically, it's "Everything revolves around me (having fun), I'm the most important person playing and screw others"

Nice social comment on blog which centers on asocial solutions.

I mean, give me a good reason you or anyone else should be more important than me. You want me to scratch your back? Scratch mine. You don't want to? Well, shit, dude, you're not my friend or family or otherwise important to me, why should I care? You can appeal to my humanity or decency, but here's a tip, saying "/all report %username%" is not it.

Back in old leaverbuster when you could leave all you want, pathetic twerps like you, who hate the world for not sucking their dick, were learning some respect, if they didn't want to be afk'd on, even if just in words and not actions. The rito ruined it with the new one, forcing stupid obligation to stay with cancer like you. Well, mister, I don't play games to do chores! And neither does anyone rational. I don't owe you a thing, don't fucking act like I do. And don't spew crap like "starting a game is obligation to finish it", because I finished it, and if we don't finish it at the same time, that's your problem.